The Education, Culture, and Sports Committee, the Labor and Welfare Committee, and the Special Committee for the Rights of the Child held a joint meeting on Monday on the dangers in operating unlicensed day-care centers for toddlers, this following the tragic death of two infants last week at an unsupervised day-care center in Jerusalem.
The debate was attended by Minister of Education Yoav Kisch, who said, “Pirate day-care centers are a phenomenon that has existed for decades. Clearly, we are trying to ensure that as many centers as possible are licensed and supervised, but without cooperation between the police, the State Attorney’s Office, local authorities, and government ministries, we will not be able to deal with this. Some operate in private homes, in unsuitable buildings. I do not have the information or the authority to go into a neighborhood and check a specific apartment to see whether there are children inside or not. Since responsibility for the issue was transferred to the Ministry of Education, thousands of kindergartens have registered and entered supervision. There were also kindergartens we closed, but it is important to understand the complexity and our limitations as well.”
Minister Kisch added: “Private kindergartens are part of the free market. Rules were set whereby supervision applies above a threshold of more than seven children, and this can be discussed, but they play an important role in the education system. For us, it is important to strengthen the recognized day-care centers.”
In response to arguments raised during the discussion by MK Naama Lazimi (Labor) regarding cuts to the designated budget for pedagogical training and activities to prevent disasters in day-care centers, Minister Kisch replied: “The budget is stable at around NIS 200 million. There were reallocations from one use to another. There were no additions as we wanted, but there was also no cut.” Following his remarks, a ministry official presented to the committees the manner in which the budgets are allocated.
Education, Culture and Sports committee chair MK Tzvi Sukkot (Religious Zionism) said, “The tragic event last week is a painful warning sign for the education system. No parent deliberately endangers his or her child. The state has left parents with limited means without a real choice by failing to establish proper supervisory infrastructure. Every child in Israel must receive supervised and safe education – at every age and in every socio-economic situation.”
Labor and Welfare committee chair MK Michal Woldiger (Religious Zionism) said, “This debate is intended to create a different reality and to ensure that what happened in Jerusalem does not happen again in any city or to any family. This is our responsibility. It is a major challenge, but it is our duty. This center operated day after day right in front of all of us, in a reality where there is a shortage of day-care centers and staff, and prices of supervised centers are very high. One can write endless laws, but without real solutions to the problems of manpower, training, and budgeting, everything will remain breached.”
MK Kathrin Shitrit (Likud), chair of the Special Committee for the Rights of the Child, said, “We talked about this and warned about it – the writing was on the wall. Today it is harder to open a falafel stand than to open a child day-care center, and this must change. Out of 350,000 infants up to three years old, one-third attend unsupervised frameworks, and there are thousands of parents who do not even know this. Only now, following the disaster, have parents begun asking caregivers whether the kindergarten is supervised.”
MK Yitshak Goldknop (United Torah Judaism) said, “I have 50 years of experience in early childhood, and I was opposed to transferring this to the Ministry of Education. Day-care centers are not a ball, and there was a whole team of people who worked on this at the Ministry of Labor. Why are there no preschool teachers? They study early childhood education and then go into high-tech, because they are not paid the same salary. In the ultra-Orthodox sector, they receive 50% of what is paid in the state-religious and state [education] systems, because they are still not entitled to Ofek Hadash [the New Horizon reform].” MK Goldknop added: “There is not a single official institution without a license. If there is an institution without a license, it is only in the state or state-religious system, which can open a kindergarten or school without a license, while recognized but unofficial education institutions can wait four months for a license.”
MK Simon Davidson (Yesh Atid) said, “We failed. It was written on the wall. We knew, we heard, we received data about the failures. The Ministry of Education is in total collapse from birth through academia. Senior officials are leaving the ministry, educators are teaching without certification, there is a shortage of 3,000 caregivers for our children, and there are no solutions. We will find ourselves in a situation where parents will not go to work. We are already inside the abyss, and we need to think about how to get out of it, and that will not happen without a real plan.”
Fares Tweel, Deputy Director General and head of the Licensing, Supervision and Enforcement Administration at the Ministry of Education, said, “When the field was transferred to the ministry’s responsibility in 2022, there were 1,900 supervised day-care centers. As of today, there are over 5,000 – about 2,200 subsidized and the rest private – and the number is constantly rising. We are doing extensive work in the licensing process – systems were built from scratch, and significant resources were invested to enable control and oversight. The ministry continues to invest millions so that the field can operate properly with the education system, and a license can be obtained even within a single day, depending on the readiness and application of the day-care center.”
Related Topics
